Transcript of “Allegro and Lento Forms of Language”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, this is Wanda Groover from Omaha, Nebraska.
I was watching a movie with one of my favorites.
Can I say the actor’s name?
Please do, yeah.
Keither Sutherland.
Oh, yeah.
And I had my CC on because sometimes, you know, I needed to hear more clearly.
I’m 71 years old.
I don’t have a hearing problem per se, but I think my hearing is changing.
So I have caption on.
And when he was telling a co-star to come here, the caption showed C apostrophe M-E-R-E.
And I went, huh?
Because I’m looking at it.
And I thought, oh, actually, yeah, come here is what I really hear for the most part.
So that raised my curiosity.
Like, okay, I called my daughter, and I mentioned it, and she’s like, I said, I never really hear come here.
She says, well, no, I hear come here all the time.
I said, oh, where?
She goes, would you say come here?
And she agreed that come here is what we actually say or hear.
And after that is when I called in to ask the question because I’m thinking, okay, that’s coming from something that means something, but what, I don’t know.
All right.
You’ve zeroed in on something important here, which is what we write is kind of an illusion when we write our language out.
What we say is another thing.
And these two languages kind of exist side by side.
And the written form is an approximation of what we say.
It’s an idealized form where we seek to be regular and perfect so that we understand each other.
Because if we wrote out what we say phonetically, a lot of what we say would look like come here, C apostrophe M-E-R-E, instead of come here.
And, of course, linguists have words for this, as they always do.
The brief form, the kameer, C-apostrophe-M-E-R-E, is known as an allegro form.
So if you know music or have studied music, in music, allegro means lively or brisk.
So allegro forms are quick representations of the speech.
And then the articulated one, for example, as you were saying, like you might say to your child when they’re not listening, come here.
That is the lento form, L-E-N-T-O.
It means it’s slower.
We carefully enunciate, maybe even exaggerate our pronunciation just so we’re clearly understood.
Oh, my goodness.
So there’s more to it.
There always is, yeah, with language.
And the other thing that’s happened specifically with come here is in English, especially American English, we don’t always pronounce the H when it’s at the beginning of a word.
So, for example, if you say, if I want to tell you to give a woman a book, I would say give it to her.
And that H is gone.
Or give it to a man.
I would say give it to him.
And the H is gone.
It’s the same thing.
So what happens is those two words come in here, they allied.
And although it’s far more common in a language like French, you will find it in English.
So come here becomes one sound.
Come here.
Is it language-based?
Like is there a cultural place where this happens?
Or is it what drives this?
It’s universal.
Every language I’ve ever studied or know anything about does some form of this.
All of them.
Because it’s universal.
People just, they speak quickly.
They flow through language.
There even are whole arguments, books, even classes taught about whether or not words exist.
And where if they do, we’re going to divide them.
Because the word divisions are somewhat artificial.
I sent something to Martha just this week showing ancient Greek where they did not put spaces between what we would call words because it all really does truly flow when we speak.
So it is a valid interest as a point.
Yeah, absolutely.
100%.
Yeah, for sure.
And Wanda, I just want to give you my blessing for using captions.
I do that all the time.
And I recently read an article that said that something like 60% of Gen Z viewers also use captions.
I think it’s the way of the future.
You guys are amazing.
And I think this is really important because, you know, language is the key to understanding in my mind.
That’s right.
I betcha.
That’s right.
You take care now.
Great talking with you, Wanda.
Bye-bye.
Okay, bye.
Bye-bye.
Well, Grant, I think you would agree that there are no silly questions when it comes to language.
There aren’t indeed, and there’s a place you can get them answered.
There sure is.
